


Distance makes the heart grow fonder

by Multifandom_damnation



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Family Dynamics, Family Reunions, Gen, Homesickness, Pranks and Practical Jokes, Sibling Bonding, Sibling Rivalry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-24
Updated: 2020-02-24
Packaged: 2021-02-28 06:21:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,805
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22869274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Multifandom_damnation/pseuds/Multifandom_damnation
Summary: Caduceus is gone just as fast as he arrived, and he leaves his siblings behind to bicker amongst themselves and think about everything he's been through in the ten years that they've been away.
Relationships: Caduceus Clay & Clarabelle Clay, Caduceus Clay & Clay Family
Comments: 22
Kudos: 241





	Distance makes the heart grow fonder

They had finally gotten settled in the room that Caduceus had paid for them, their parents and aunt talking quietly amongst themselves in the room next door, and Clarabelle sat at the window as she watched Caduceus and his friends shuffle awkwardly into the alley beside the inn. The back of his head and the tip of the purple crystal atop his staff was all she could see, and he turned around as if sensing that he was being watched to wink at her through the window before a harried look came over his face and he darted forward into a bright flash of light and was gone.

Sighing, Clarabelle pushed away from the window, a little reluctantly, and returned to her comfy little corner. “Well,” she announced to her bickering siblings. “Caduceus is gone.”

Frowning, Calliope and Colton exchanged a glance before both rushing to the window, trying to each be the one to get there first. “Gone?” Calliope repeated. “How could he be gone already? He just left the inn!”

Scrunching up her nose, Clarabelle watched as her siblings fought for a place at the window. “I know magic when I see it. He’s gone. So are his friends.”

Colton looked frustrated, but then again, he always seemed frustrated if the topic of conversation wasn’t about him. “Why would he leave so soon? We were all together again for the first time in who knows how long and then he just leaves without a second thought?”

“It’s been ten years for him,” Calliope defended as she slowly moved away from the window to sink, defeated, onto one of the beds. “Why wouldn’t he leave? He’s given us the cure, he’s saved us, and now he has to continue with whatever he was doing before he found us. Life just can’t stop like that, you know this.”

Worrying at his lip, Colton was the last to move from the window, and he looked in every shadow and side street and large crowd that Caduceus could possibly hide in, and was disappointed when he couldn’t see anything. “I suppose so,” Colton said slowly as he finally pushed away. “I guess I just didn’t think that he would leave us so soon. That he would stay with us a few days at most. Not run off with his new… friends.”

“They’re a weird bunch,” Calliope agreed. “I have no idea how he managed to run into them.”

“I like them,” Clarabelle said as she ran her fingers over the brim of her new straw hat. “They seem nice.”

“What would you know, Bell?” Colton grumbled as he paced back and forth in the tiny room with his arms crossed behind his back. “You barely even spoke to them the whole time you were there.”

Narrowing her eyes, Clarabelle watched him pace and stuck out her foot when he got close enough to make him stumble. His arms windmilled to stop himself from falling onto the floor and he balanced himself against the wall, sending a glare in her direction. “They all worked together to help bring Aunt Corrin back, and they helped Caduceus kill the metal boar, so I think that has to count for something.”

Lying back on the bed with her hair fanning out behind her, Calliope laughed softly. “She has a point, you know,” she sighed. “Is it weird that I miss him already?”

Scoffing, Colton walked to his own bed, careful to avoid Clarabelle’s legs this time. “Yes. It’s very wried. He’s been gone for less than five minutes.”

"I miss him," Clarabelle said, ignoring Colton. "I hope he liked my bugs."

Put out, Colton grossed his arms and leant up against the back wall. “Of course he liked your bugs. He let them crawl all over him and into that stupid stick of his.”

Outraged, Calliope sat up and pointed an accusatory finger at Colton, who looked at her bored, while Clarabelle sniggered behind her hand. “Listen here, Colton, keep in mind that _I_ made that stupid stick, and it’s done pretty well so far. I worked very hard on that staff.”

“I’m sure,” Colton said, but he didn’t seem convinced.

Clarabelle looked towards the window again as if expecting Caduceus to come back and pop his brightly coloured head into the room- well, not quite so bright any more- and tell them all that it was going to be alright and it was all a joke and that he would never leave them. But while she was young, she was never foolish. She knew that when Caduceus put his mind to something, he followed it through no matter what, and that was many of the things she loved most about him. “I wonder what his friend is going to be like,” she said to break the tense silence that had fallen over the room. “You know, the one that’s going to take us home.”

“As strange as the others I assume,” Colton said, still staring at the ceiling with his arms folded over his chest. “Which is hard to believe. Someone stranger than that lot? Almost unbelievable.”

“I think she likes cupcakes,” Calliope, also lying on her back on her own bed and examining her chipped nails, said with disinterest. “I saw the blue one buying like three boxes of them.”

"Jester. The blue one’s name is Jester," Clarabelle said. She ignored the looks her siblings gave her, craning their heads off the beds to look at her. “What do you think it’ll look like when we finally get there?”

Slowly, Calliope sat up onto her arms. “Uh… when we finally get where, Bell?”

“Home. Back to the Blooming Grove,” She said it quietly, but with an expression on her face like the answer should be obvious. “I wonder what it’s like now. Caduceus said that we’ve all been gone for at least ten years, right? I wonder how different it will be from what we remember.”

“We won’t really know until we see it,” Calliope said. “I’m sure Caduceus took care of it as well as he could, so the graves and the garden and the temple will surely be just as perfect as it always been. The rot might be worse. Without the cure, it might have grown darker, or overgrown the borders of the woods, or taken over part of the Grove. But I’m sure Caduceus did his best to take care of it. I’ll still be our home, just maybe not the way we remember it.”

“If we get home at all,” Colton muttered unhelpfully. “This friend of theirs seems unreliable, and I’m not sure we can trust her.”

One of Clarabelle’s many skills was ignoring her siblings when they said stupid things, and that was a skill she employed now as she stood from her corner and made her way back over to the window, where dwarves and elves and the occasional human rushed back and forth across the streets, hurrying to get to their destinations. “I wonder… I wonder how he is. Caduceus. He was alone for so long… I wonder if he thought that we abandoned him. If we were never coming back on purpose.”

The mood in the room grew sombre and both her siblings sat up from the bed as the topic of conversation turned serious. “I would expect so,” Calliope said, voice low, head down. “I mean, ten years? None of us lasted that long. But Caduceus has always been strong as he’s always been sickly. If anyone was going to survive ten years of isolation in a dying forest surviving off of tea and vegetables and still manage to do their duty, it would be Cad.”

“But, just like with home,” Colton argued. “He’s still the same Caduceus we grew up with. A pain in the ass, a trouble maker, but he’s still our brother. Just… different.”

Clarabelle thought back to the moment her body found life again after being frozen in stone for too many years to count, and the look on Caduceus’s exhausted face as she realized that the stranger standing before her with a hand on her cheek was the brother she had left behind at home. “He’s more different than I think any of us realize. Did you see all those scars? How dinged up his armour was? It didn’t have a scratch when we left. And his hair is so light now, duller than I’ve ever seen it. Where the hell has he been?”

“He’s living a life more adventurous than any of us have,” Calliope said. “I’d bet that he’s been in more fights than either me or Colton or even Aunt Corrin for that matter. Who would have thought it?”

The throw-away comment, though harmless, hurt Colton’s ego that had fractured significantly when he had been rescued by Caduceus and he sat up straighter with his arms crossed over his chest and a familiar scowl on his face. “He shouldn’t have left the Blooming Grove then. He’s always been the least capable of looking after himself when it comes to combat. He knew from our stories how dangerous the world was out there. If he couldn’t handle himself, he shouldn’t have gone.”

“If he hadn’t have left, then we’d still be stuck as statues for whoever knows how long, the cure would never have made it to the Grove and Caduceus would have been alone the rest of his long life thinking that we abandoned him and that we left him to rot with our home!” Calliope snapped, spinning to face him. She always had the least amount of patience with her oldest brother. “So just be thankful that he did leave!”

Turning back to the window, Clarabelle sighed through her nose and leant on her arms on the windowsill as Colton rose his chin in defiance. “If I had just been given a little more time then I would have gotten us out. And with Caduceus gone, who’s protecting our home? We told him to stay behind and he didn’t listen, just like always. What if there’s no home to return to because he wasn’t there to protect it like he swore he would when we left?”

Calliope's eyes went wild as she stood from the bed with the squeaking of old rusted strings and the thumping of her heavy boots on the wooden flooring. “Oh, really? You had ten gods damned years to get us out of there, Colton, and you were just as frozen as the rest of us, so stop with this now.”

Clarabelle fiddled with the rim of her hat again as she watched a dwarven couple whisk into the same alleyway that Caduceus had disappeared from. There was a flash of pantaloons, and a garter, and then nothing. “I think that if Caduceus hadn’t have come when he did, we all would have been dead by now,” a thought came to her as an errant stalk of straw pinched at her finger, and she broke it off carefully so as not to ruin the arrangement. “Hey, now that we’ve all been technically statues for ten years, does that make Caduceus the oldest child?”

It took everything Calliope had in her to stifle her laughter with her hand at the look on Colton’s face. “What, no-'' he spluttered before frowning at Clarabelle. “Take that stupid hat off now, Bell. It’s too big for your head, and you can’t even see.”

“But Caduceus said that we have to stay incognito,” Clarabelle protested. “And he would know. He’s been around more than the rest of us.”

Frustrated, Colton growled and stood from the bed before storming out of the room in a huff and slamming the door behind him. "That's right!" Calliope shouted after him. "Walk away!" Deflating slightly, she muttered, "Big baby," before turning back to Clarabelle at the window.

Curled up against the window, Clarabelle was running her hand through her hair with her free hand and holding the dangling straw hat in the other. She watched the outside as more people rushed past, and felt a pang of loneliness. “Is this how Caduceus felt all that time?” she mused to no one in particular, but she knew that her sister was listening. “Lonely? Did he go mad with it? Do you think he blames us for never coming back?”

Sighing, Calliope moved from her bed to join Clarabelle at the window and wrapped her arms around her, pulling her close. Clarabelle leant into the contact. “No, I don’t think he blames us. It’s not like we did it on purpose. We were frozen in _stone_ for Melora’s sake. He can’t blame us for something we had no knowledge or control of.”

Shaking her head, Clarabelle’s hair fell in her face and Calliope brushed it away with a tender hand. “Why did we leave him? Why didn’t we take him with us? He shouldn’t have stayed.”

Turning away from gazing out the window, Calliope rested her chin on her sisters head as she pulled her tighter against her body. “Someone needed to stay and hold down the fort, Bell, you know this. But Caduceus… Colton was right. He’s never really been a fighter. He thought it was his place to stay back and tend the Grove while we were gone, and maybe it’s our fault for making him feel like that, but you know how he gets when he sets his mind on something. I’m surprised he left at all. I guess, if the circumstances were different, he probably wouldn’t have.”

“Ten years,” Clarabelle whispered. “He was all alone for ten years. Did you see the look on his face when we gave him that hug? He looked like he was going to start crying. I couldn’t watch.”

Calliope remembered. She didn’t like to, but she did, and she knew exactly what Clarabelle was talking about. “Caduceus is strong. Maybe not physically, but he’s strong in every other way. If anyone was going to survive ten years in isolation, it’d be him.”

“Why was he apologizing to mum and dad?” Clarabelle asked. “I didn’t understand. I still don’t. He did nothing wrong. He saved us all, he found the cure, he looked after our home while we were away. He did everything right, everything he was supposed to. Why does he think that he did something wrong?”

There were many things that Calliope could say, but she didn’t think that any of them had a right coming from her, so she ran her fingers through Clarabelle’s hair and placed a kiss on the wild locks. “I don’t know,” she lied. “I guess you’ll just have to ask him the next time you see him.”

Sniffling, Clarabelle wiped at her nose with the back of her hand, and it was the first time that Calliope realized that her sister had been crying. “Colton’s a jerk,” she said. “Why can’t he just be happy that Caduceus saved us instead of trying to take credit and be the hero?”

A thought came to Calliope then, a bright, ingenious thought that she knew Caduceus would be proud of. “Would you mind sleeping in Aunt Corrin’s room tonight?”

“No, I don’t mind,” Clarabelle said, looking up at Calliope with narrowed eyes still wet at the corners. “Why? What are you planning?”

“Oh, nothing,” Calliope said innocently. “Just something Caduceus asked me to do, that’s all.”

That night, while everyone was fast asleep, including Colton snoring in the bed beside her own, Calliope rose from the covers and touched her feet to the cold floor, pulling the odd-shaped flute out from the folds of her tunic, and crept across the floor. The boards creaked, but Colton’s snoring muffled it, and as moonlight filtered in from the open window, Calliope brought the flute right up to her brother's ear and blew into it as hard as she could.

A loud honking-screaming sound echoed through the room and out of the open window and into the street. Colton woke up with a yelp, flailing around in the covers like a fish caught in a net as he tried to find a weapon to face the unknown danger. Her father’s snoring she could hear through the wall from the room next door stopped suddenly as her family sat up in fright. Calliope fell back onto her own bed, cackling, as Colton whipped around to face her, panting, eyes wild, hair a mess all over his face. “ _Calliope_!” he roared and that just made her laugh harder. “Did Caduceus put you up to this?”

“Absolutely,” Calliope laughed as Colton’s scowl deepened and he laid down with his back to her and placed a pillow over his head. Now Calliope understood the magic of the bone flute and hoped that she had done Caduceus proud, wherever he was.

**Author's Note:**

> I love the Clay family more than I love myself


End file.
